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Mostly Everything

Under the Hood: HP Z1 All in One Workstation

The HP Z1 is an engineering marvel. In the same way that space-saver apartments are awe-inspiring, the Z1 is wireless (as in everything is snap on!) solution to the workstation that saves a ton of space inside and out. This cuts corners when it comes to maintenance allowing your IT guy easy access to remove and replace hardware by just snapping modules in and out.

I’ve never been in love with a workstation before; a workstation you’d actually find in a call center floor or your run off the mill IT department. But that’s just how amazing this thing is. Treating the desktop workstation like a car, you can easily pop up the hood and see the insides laid neatly on the 27 inch flat screen’s behind. Everything is removable — from the motherboard to the fans and heatsink, the NVIDIA Quadro video card (optional), Intel Xeon Processor, and the hard drives. Even the wireless USB receiver is located inside the hood allowing you to use the mouse and keyboard without any wires.

The HP Z1 Workstation isn’t just available on bulk order for the enterprise market but will also be made available over the counter for consumers who want a desktop solution that even mom can take apart. It retails in the PHP 80,000.00 and thereabouts.

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Mostly Everything

BlackBerry 10 and what RIM should be doing instead

Oh wow, look it’s the new iPhone! Wait, it’s Blackberry 10 pala!

It’s no secret that the once darling smartphone manufacturer Research in Motion has been losing ground to more elegant operating systems Android, iOS and yes even Windows Phone. It doesn’t seem apparent if you live in the Philippines, but globally RIM is skidding into a downward slope, with tipping points including the huge service outage of their BBM service in the USA last October 2011. Because 3rd party developers and iOS have created their own platform-specific BBM-like services, RIM is slowly losing its edge in technology.

RIM lost significant market share worldwide to Apple’s iPhone and to smartphones running Google’s Android operating system, which caused a decline in profit and share value. On December 16, 2011 RIM shares fell to their lowest price since January 2004 and the stock dropped 77 percent in 2011 alone. By March 2012 shares were worth less than $14, from a height of over $140 in 2008. The BlackBerry PlayBook, launched in 2011 as a business-oriented alternative to the Apple iPad, was a critical and commercial failure. Meanwhile, chief executive Thorsten Heins reaffirmed RIM’s business focus, explaining that consumer-friendly features like entertainment applications are not important to the company’s core customers. [source]

One thing RIM still does have is their amazing push email service which has been unmatched in compressing data through the airwaves. In simpler terms, if I were BlackBerry, instead of trying to develop a new mobile OS and licensing it to other manufacturers (which is a dumb strategy), I would focus my efforts on licensing their push email server to all other platforms.

The new Blackberry 10 look great but we’re done with the era of features because these come a dime a dozen. We’re in the era of ecosystems and right now, RIM is trailing behind three other application marketplaces. Will the newly redesigned OS hamper conversions of legacy Blackberry applications as well?

Categories
Geek

Zombie Friendster is back to play your games

So Friendster is back from the dead and they’re here to make you play online games.

Truth is, this is old news as the pioneering social network announced their shift from social networking into social gaming as late as last year. It’s only this 2012 that they’re making a huge marketing push bringing things like the “biggest gaming event” to SM North EDSA. I have some friends from the Level-Up eGames merger who will emotionally contest this claim.

Continue reading “Zombie Friendster is back to play your games”
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Mostly Everything

Wise words from my idol, James Cameron

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Mostly Everything

‘Running with Sardines’ a piece I wrote for Rappler.com

Bianca Grey of Rappler asked me for a piece on my most memorable travels around the country. Hands down, it was the Sardine Run of Pescador Island in Moalboal, Cebu.

MOALBOAL, Cebu City – From afar, it looked like we were floating into an underwater valley that vanished into the blue.

But then I remembered we were diving around a very small island with no other rock formations visible from above. It was impossible to have something this huge and this dense underwater with no manifestation from the surface. Then, as we got closer to these formations, our eyes adjusted and all of a sudden, the wall on the left didn’t look like a wall at all. Because walls don’t stay still. It was shifting, turning, and sparkling against the sunlight with parts of it breaking away for a split second and then coming back.

‘Running with Sardines’ by Jayvee Fernandez